Tower and Town, December 2017

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Amelia Earhart: The Unsolved Mystery

Amelia Earhart, the American pilot, was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24th 1897. She was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic and also first to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. During one of her navigated flights around the globe, Earhart disappeared somewhere near or over the Pacific in July 1937 but plane wreckage was never found, making it still one of the most interesting unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

In World War One Amelia Earhart served as a Red Cross nurse in Toronto.

After the war she returned to America where she took her first plane ride in California in December 1920. She then passed her flight test in 1921 after taking lessons with a female flight instructor.

On June 1st 1937, Earhart and co-navigator Fred Noonan started their flight around the world, taking off from Oakland, California. On June 29th, they had reached New Guinea after flying a staggering 22,000 miles; they only had 7,000 miles left before returning back home.

On July 2nd, Earhart stopped to refuel; this was the last time Amelia Earhart was ever seen. Radio connection with the coastguard was lost and it seems that she had disappeared en route.

The U.S. President at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, announced a two week search for the pair. On July 19th, 1937 they were both declared lost at sea.

There have been many theories, the most common of which is that she crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean; it has been suggested that her plane lost fuel while she was searching for Howland Island, and that she crashed in the middle of the Ocean. Many expeditions have been sent out over the years to try and find Amelia’s plane. High tech systems and deep-sea robots have all failed to find any plane wreckage.

The Gardner Island Hypothesis proposes that while flying to Howland Island, Earhart took a turn and landed on Gardner Island, 350 miles South West. A week after, a few navy planes flew over and appear to have said they noted some clues which could indicate that people had actually been living there. This means that they could have survived for days or even weeks before dying on the island.

Searchers found artefacts such as a piece of glass which could have come from the window of Earhart’s plane, some tools, a woman’s shoe dating back from the 1930s, old cosmetics jars and bones which were said to have come from a human finger.

In 2017, sniffer dogs were sent to search the island for any more remains of Earhart's and Noonan's bones.

Even today, this tragic mystery from the twentieth century still fascinates us.

Amelia Hicks